Green Planets (20 page)

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BRAVE NEW WORLDS AND LANDS OF THE FLIES

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“The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People”

Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction

SABINE HÖHLER

My fellow citizens: It is with a heavy heart that I bring you the findings of the council. After deliberating in continuous sessions for the last four months in unceasing efforts to find a solution to the devastating problem of overpopulation threatening to destroy what remains of our planet, the World Federation Council has considered and rejected all halfway measures advanced by the various regional scientific congresses. We have also rejected proposals for selective euthanasia and mass sterilization. Knowing the sacrifices that our decision will entail, the World Council has nevertheless reached a unanimous decision. I quote: “Because it has been agreed by the nations of the world that the earth can no longer sustain a continuously increasing population, as of today, the first of January, we join with all other nations of the world in the following edict: childbearing is herewith forbidden.” To bear a child shall be the greatest of crime, punishable by death. Women now pregnant will report to local hospitals for registration. I earnestly request your cooperation in this effort to ensure the last hope for survival of the human race.
ZPG
: Zero Population Growth

ZPG
, released in 1971, deals with the rigid measures for population control that a densely populated Earth might require in the future. In the effort to ensure the survival of the human race the World Council rules that having children will be strictly illegal for the coming thirty years. Set in a thickly polluted American metropolis, the movie tells the story of the young white couple Russ and Carol, who, upset with having to make do with a surrogate robot
baby, secretly give birth to a child, whom they hide carefully from friends and neighbors. However, the young family is discovered by a neighboring couple, itself with a strong desire for a child. A fight about proprietary rights results in blackmail and betrayal, and finally in the disclosure of the child to the authorities. The family is arrested, their elimination imminent.
¹

Around 1970, scenarios of population growth and restrictions on reproduction were explored not only in works of fiction. “
ZPG
—Zero Population Growth” was also the name of a US activist group founded in 1968 to raise public awareness of the “population problem.” The group sought to confront the white American middle class with its lifestyle of using up far more than its global share of natural resources and adding more than its share to environmental pollution.
ZPG
meant to secure a birth rate of 2.2 to achieve a desired replacement rate of 1:1 and to thereby realize the dream of a numerically stable population—zero population growth. The initial mission was to encourage citizens to reduce family size: “Stop at Two,” “Stop Heir Pollution,” and “Control Your Local Stork” were some of
ZPG
's slogans advertised on bumper stickers, flyers, and posters, in public service announcements, magazines, and organized protest marches.
ZPG
also founded its own “Population Education Department” that produced classroom texts, and a video titled
World Population
that was used as an educational tool in public exhibitions, museums, and zoos. The organization did not confine its actions to showing movies and handing out condoms. It also urged changes in population policy and abortion legislation, and it opened vasectomy clinics.
²

Among
ZPG
's founding members was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose popular book
The Population Bomb
(1968) briefly boosted group membership to more than thirty thousand in its first year.
³
Drawing on his studies of animal populations, Ehrlich warned about the impending destructive “explosion” of the human world populace. He became one of the founders of population ecology, which emerged from population biology by extending the realm of the natural sciences to the study of human societies in relation to their environments.
⁴
As the historian Matthew Connelly aptly put it, “Political problems were assumed to be biological in origin, potentially affecting the whole species.”
⁵

The “natural laws” of population growth leveled individual and social differences. People were aggregated into comparable numerical entities to make them “accountable”: commensurable for the sake of statistics and responsible for their reproductive behavior. The ecological and governmental calculus of allocating contested earthly living space along the lines and divides of biological,
ecological, and economical eligibility of human beings and populations warrant more research, to which I have contributed elsewhere.
⁶
This chapter, however, attends to the thin line between science fact and science fiction in population ecologists' accounts.

THE SCIENCE AND THE FICTION OF POPULATION GROWTH

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the perceived “population problem” was neither about science nor about fiction only. Both ecological science and ecological fiction invented truisms about too many people sharing too little space and about how overpopulation would soon destroy what remained of planet Earth. “Ecocide” through unprecedented population increase, environmental degradation, and resource exploitation became the subject of numerous popular works of science. Ecologists employed alarming images of exponential growth of industrial pollution, the resource consumption of the rising world economy, or of sheer human numbers within the recently discovered limits of Earth as a “small planet.”
⁷

To understand the popularity of population ecology around 1970, its science fictional elements need to be taken seriously.
⁸
Population ecologists shared with science fiction writers similar sweeping concerns, like the “survival of the human race,” and similar narrative strategies, like shifting present observations to other times and spaces. As Connelly observes, the actors “seeking support for campaigns to control world population continually pointed to the future because they could not actually prove that it had caused any particular crisis or emergency” in the present time.
⁹

Moreover, population ecologists were poignantly prophetic about the future of
all
of humanity on the global scale. They corroborated their planetary predictions with scientific references to Malthusian and Darwinian evolutionary theories of natural selection and differential reproduction. Numerical approaches to social and political problems were supplemented by forthright deliberations on technical fixes. Suggestions of selective euthanasia and mass sterilization were not limited to works of
SF
but were also openly discussed in ecological publications. And finally, population ecologists proved to be genuine science fiction writers when toying with new forms of supranational governments and “new ways in which the world might be divided and united”
¹⁰
to allocate planetary living space and resources. How many people could the world support, who
should live, who should decide, and how—these were the questions population ecologists concerned themselves with.
¹¹

I will focus on the work of Garrett Hardin (1925–2003), an American biologist and professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hardin was a prolific and provocative writer. His philosophy of reproductive restraints was highly contested during his lifetime and remained so after his death. Most notorious perhaps are his writings on the access to common resources and on reproductive responsibility, summarized in his 1972 book
Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle
.
¹²
This book provides a case of ecological
SF
through its blending of analytic approach with fictional narrative. Drawing on the traditions of science fiction literature and film, Hardin asks his readers to suspend their disbelief in a near apocalyptic future. He sets his story on a spaceship, providing a perfect stage to a fast-motion recapture of humankind's history and impending doom as the population exceeds the “carrying capacity” of its finite environment.

Hardin defines carrying capacity as a measure of the maximum exploitation an environment will permit, without diminution, into the indefinite future. In terms of nature's revenues, Hardin states: “The carrying capacity is the level of exploitation that will yield the maximum return, in the long run.”
¹³
In terms of population pressure, carrying capacity defines the maximum number of a species that an environment can support indefinitely without reducing its ability to support the same number in the future. The problem of a limited ecological carrying capacity, on Earth as in any other contained environment, came along with the question of how to dispense with the increasing “surplus” of human beings and entire human populations.
¹⁴

The spaceship
Beagle
literally embodies this problem. To Hardin the
Beagle
serves neither as a device to explore new worlds and encounter alien life forms nor as part of a powerful fleet in interstellar war or as an exit technology to transport earthly nature to outer space and terraform new planets. Rather, the intergenerational spaceship serves as a metaphor and a model of human life in a finite environment.
¹⁵
Hardin's narrative resonates with recurring references to the ship in contemporary environmental discourse. Ehrlich repeatedly spoke of the “good ship Earth” on the verge of sinking.
¹⁶
The United Nations conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 fashioned the One Boat concept, the thought that all of humanity shared a common fate within absolute limits.
¹⁷
From the voyages of discovery to the Space Age, the ship had been a reservoir of collective memory and imagination in Western culture. The
ship harbored the congregation or family of mankind and was a figure of hope, shelter, and survival.

In the following sections I will explore three aspects of the
Beagle
's voyage that were central to Hardin's new ethics for the survival of the human race: first, the conservation and replication of earthly achievements and failures, presenting the
Beagle
as ark and archive; second, the circulation and allocation of limited resources and living space, featuring the
Beagle
as a spaceship or technologically sustained metabolism; and third, the demands of its carrying capacity on the eligibility of its passengers for a place aboard, turning the
Beagle
into a lifeboat. I will close with Hardin's “lifeboat ethics,” a selective ethics, which imagines a shipwreck situation to determine who should survive the global ecological crisis. Taking a strictly scientific approach to lifeboat capacity, Hardin saw traditional ethical considerations unhinged by necessity. His ethics for survival is thus perhaps the most striking work of science fiction produced in the 1970s.

CONSERVATION AND REPLICATION: THE
BEAGLE
AS ARK AND ARCHIVE

Reflecting his analytical plot, each of the three parts of Hardin's book opens with a report from the
Beagle
's journey. The reports describe practical features of life aboard: embarkation and first problems of environmental effluence; reproductive responsibility and regulatory mechanisms installed; and soaring overpopulation and ensuing drastic measures. The first part also explains the
Beagle
's mission, begun in Hardin's own lifetime. “When people realized that Earth would be destroyed someday, they decided that they had to do something about it. Obviously the thing to do was to make a big spaceship, fill it with people, and blast it off towards other stars to look for a planet to settle on.”
¹⁸
The U.S. government sent out the
Beagle
on a journey of 480 years to Alpha Centauri (the name of
Beagle
as homage to the change of humankind's place in the world brought about by Charles Darwin, and to the Americans' love of dogs). The ship measures three kilometers in diameter and harbors one thousand people; it is equipped with artificial gravity and with a plastic sky, nice family apartments, and
TV
. Apart from the lack of automobiles, the
Beagle
is “just like home.”
¹⁹

The mission also experiments with the Marxist critique that capitalism requires (wasteful) expansion to sustain itself. The spaceship is designed as a test case for a steady-state society. Nevertheless it soon turns out that the mission itself is an emission: the selected emissaries are on their way to emitting the
American way of life to the entire universe. Start-up businesses cause the first environmental problems on board when they begin swiftly depleting resources and polluting public goods like air and water. On a micro-scale, the predicament of supporting free enterprise and private profit on the one hand and acknowledging public demands on the other unfolds at an extremely accelerated pace. Within the perfect enclosure of the spaceship, the American spirit of industrialization and the capitalist economy and consumer cycle literally run up against the wall.

The
Beagle
is an archive that goes beyond the miniature worlds that authors like Jules Verne have furnished in such works as
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
(1870), in which the submarine
Nautilus
keeps a library of twelve thousand volumes, a collection of art and music, and a museum at the traveler's disposal. While Verne's nineteenth-century vessels were encyclopedic collections of humankind's knowledge and technology, the
Beagle
not only contains but replicates humankind's evolutionary successes and failures on a small scale. The
Beagle
represents the primal archive, the inventory of the life on Earth: the ark. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has analyzed the ark as the perfect example of the “ontology of enclosed space.”
²⁰
Ark
, from the Latin
arca
, means case or compartment. According to Sloterdijk, the ark denotes an artificial interior space, a “swimming endosphere” that provides the only possible environment for its inhabitants.
²¹
In Hardin's account the spaceship makes a finite insular habitat; material, informational, or energetic exchanges with its environment are not possible. The
Beagle
is a closed system.